Our MFA program is sponsoring a reading this November 10 at 6:00 pm in VA 101. The reading will feature Nancy Best, Annie Buckley, Stephen Lehigh, Paula Priamos, Jennifer Sweeney, and Corinna Vallianatos. All are welcome to attend this wonderful event featuring these writers from our department.
Nancy Best’s novel, Breath-hold, led her to underwater research and photography on diving expeditions all over the world. It also gave her the opportunity to work with some of the world’s most renowned dolphin researchers and marine biologists. Her underwater photos have been in numerous exhibits, including the upcoming Water Colors, Images from the Deep exhibit at SBVD early next year. She has received a Lovett Merit Award for Fiction and a California Arts Council Residency, and she has also been nominated for Best Emerging American Voices. Besides publishing in local literary magazines, she has a non-fiction piece anthologized by the academic press Camden House in their selection of writings Encountering Disgrace, and she has also edited a book on John Grisham for Greenhaven Press. She will be reading a short excerpt from her novel.
Annie Buckley is an artist and writer and most recently, the author of Psychic Outlaws, a novel published by the Luckman Gallery at Cal State Los Angeles in 2010. The Luckman Gallery also sponsored an exhibition of new works by 19 Los Angeles-based artists inspired by the novel. She is also the author of a book of short stories, Navigating Ghosts, published in 2007 as part of Nothing Moments, an interdisciplinary project in art, literature, and design that included a traveling exhibition and a series of 24 books distributed by Ram Publications. Her newest project, a picture book integrating yoga and ecology, she wrote and illustrated using a fusion of digital and hand-cut photo collage. The Breathing Bridge is due out from Brighter Books of Canada in December 2012.
Stephen Lehigh completed his Ph.D. in British and American Literature in 2011 at the University of Utah, finishing his Dissertation: “Recovering Romantic Theory: The Unsayable and Illegible in Coleridge and Shelley.” Recently, he presented a conference paper entitled, “Making Space and Giving Time: Temporality, Calculation, and Poetic Composition in Shelley’s Defense of Poetry.” He teaches literature and creative writing courses at CSUSB and currently edits the student-run literary magazine, Badlands, at the Palm Desert Campus. In his spare time, he tries to write, and he will be reading from his manuscript, Hard Rain.
Paula Priamos’ writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post Magazine, Orange Coast Magazine and the San Francisco Chronicle, among other publications. An excerpt from her forthcoming memoir, The Shyster’s Daughter (Etruscan Press) was recently published in ZYZZYVA literary magazine. Her memoir will be Etruscan Press’ lead title in Spring 2012, and she will be reading from the chapter titled “The Insanity Defense.”
Jennifer K. Sweeney’s second poetry collection, How to Live on Bread and Music, received the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Perugia Press Prize, and was later nominated for the Poets’ Prize. Her first book, Salt Memory, won the Main Street Rag Poetry Award. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, the Elinor Benedict Poetry Award from Passages North and two Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg awards. Her poems have been translated into Turkish and published widely in literary journals including American Poetry Review and Poetry Daily. She lives in Redlands, CA with her husband, poet Chad Sweeney and their son, Liam.
Corinna Vallianatos’ short story collection, My Escapee, won the 2011 AWP Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction and will be published by the University of Massachusetts Press in fall 2012. Her stories have appeared in Tin House, McSweeney’s, A Public Space, The Gettysburg Review, The Cincinnati Review, Epoch, and elsewhere. She will be reading from her novel-in-progress, tentatively entitled Flock.